The Sexual Barbarism of October 7

National Review Online

Thursday, May 14, 2026

 

On October 7, 2023, the world watched as Hamas terrorists and their supporters spilled over Gaza’s borders into Israel, slaughtering and torturing anyone in their paths.

 

The enormity of the attack has always been clear, but a recently released report conducted by the Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women’s rights organization, recounts the barbarism of that day in excruciating, granular detail.

 

It is not for the faint-hearted. The Daily Mail was the first to report on the commission’s findings, which were compiled by researchers who interviewed over 400 witnesses, survivors, and experts, and who sifted through 10,000 photographs and 1,800 hours of “visual analysis.” The report’s authors detailed evidence of mass murder, systemic rape, mutilation, dismemberment, sexual torture, immolation, and medieval torments once consigned to history.

 

“There wasn’t a single body that just ‘died normally,’” one survivor told examiners. “Every single one had gone through torture.” One woman who was gang-raped by terrorists had her breasts cut off. Her attackers toyed with one, threw it in the street, and raped her before executing their victim while her assault was ongoing. Another woman was stabbed to death and posthumously raped in front of witnesses. “In parts of the body, in the intimate area, nails were embedded,” said one first responder of the bodies he encountered. Another emergency worker described “aluminum cans, grenades, nails, blunt objects, rods, household tools and spike-like instruments, inserted into genitals and other parts of the body” of the victims.

 

That practice was, apparently, systemic. In one room where bodies were discovered “completely mutilated,” a third witness found “knives, scalpels, a hammer, an axe, screwdrivers,” and other “tools from the household” inserted into corpses.

 

The torture was gleeful — filmed by its executors, in many cases — and there were no bounds of human decency. “Adults and children were bound and burned with wire around them,” said one witness. Hamas hostages were, “in some cases, sexually abused alongside or in front of family members.” More horrifying still, family members were “forced to commit sex acts on each other,” the Daily Mail reported, “an intentional, premeditated strategy of kinocide to destroy family units even after release from captivity.”

 

Although men “were also sexually abused and, in at least one case, gang raped,” the women who fell into Hamas’s clutches endured the worst tortures. They were “stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned,” and often “executed both during and after rape.” Some women’s heads “had been bashed in, with their brains spilling out.” Others were riddled with so many bullets their extremities disintegrated. Their genitals were disfigured, impaled, and burned, as were their faces. The attackers’ goal, the report concluded, was “to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.”

 

The report concludes that the brutality on display on October 7 was so uniform that it was obviously “systemic, widespread, and integral” to the attack. In other words, it was all part of the plan. Hamas terrorists were not indulging a spontaneous reptilian impulse; they were following orders.

 

That’s the most crucial of the report’s implied findings. It comes at a conspicuous time, too.

 

This week, just in advance of this report’s release, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof accused the State of Israel of a version of the same kind of savagery.

 

While Kristof’s piece dutifully acknowledges that there “is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes,” the columnist nevertheless accused Israel of deploying sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees as a matter of “organized state policy.” Among the many accusations is the claim that Israel has managed to train dogs to anally penetrate male prisoners.

 

It was a facially implausible accusation that is already falling apart upon scrutiny.

 

The thin and dubious sourcing for the allegation probably would not have survived the Times’ typically rigorous fact-checking regime had it not been too titillating — and too damaging to Israel — to check. And Kristof’s report had the practical utility — if not to him, certainly to his pro-Hamas sources — of preempting the Civil Commission’s report. If everyone’s guilty, who’s to say who the real malefactor is?

 

For tacit and explicit supporters of Israel’s terrorist enemies, the truth doesn’t matter. They need no evidence to support the notion that Israel is a genocidaire — even if it is an incompetent one that somehow allowed the Palestinian population expand. To the extent that they demand any proof that Israel is engineering famines in the Palestinian territories, the images of children (it’s always children) who suffer from unrelated genetic conditions will suffice. Anything to undermine the Jewish state and support the enemies of our civilization who are arrayed against it.

 

It is incumbent on the rest of us to be clear-eyed about the nature of the enemy that confronts us, which no one who reads the Civil Commission’s horrifying report in good faith can doubt.